Judd Apatow at Last Night’s HBO Girls Premiere: “This Is Like If You Got to See Sam Malone on Cheers Have Sex”

Photos:Judd Apatow at Last Night’s HBO Girls Premiere: “This Is Like If You Got to See Sam Malone on Cheers Have Sex”

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Judd Apatow and Lena Dunham.

By Nicholas Hunt/PatrickMcMullan.com.

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At the Cinema Society premiere party for HBO’s new show Girls last night, producer Judd Apatow described the series, a study of the less-than-glamorous lives of a group of young New York women, as a show about normal life. Normal, uncensored life. “This is like if you got to see Sam Malone on Cheers have sex,” Apatow told Vanity Fair.

There are scenes with nudity and sex, many involving the show’s writer, director, and star, Lena Dunham. “Lena is very comfortable showing human sexuality,” Apatow said, “and is also comfortable being naked.”

“I am,” Dunham agreed with a shrug. “It doesn’t faze me. I don’t know why—there are so many things that bother me so much,” she told Vanity Fair. For instance? “I’m scared of a lot of different kinds of germs. I’m afraid of developing chronic fatigue syndrome, because I’m really good at imagining it. I know it’s not an imaginary illness, but I could psychosomatically give it to myself if I thought about it for too long. Therefore I’m also scared of having a hysterical pregnancy. And I’m also afraid of running into someone who’s yelled at me before,” she reeled off.

But Dunham insists she’s not concerned about her parents watching her nude scenes. “My dad paints penises for a job, so I’ve had to look at his art my whole life,” she declared. “So he can look at this.”

Apatow admitted to a bit of discomfiture with the raw scenes. “It is a little uncomfortable for me to sit in a room with Lena for five months watching a lot of footage of her undressed. It certainly tests the friendship,” he said.

Chatting about the series got Apatow, 44, reminiscing about when he was Dunham’s age. Back then, he once “took mushrooms and went to see Frank Sinatra and Don Rickles,” he said. “At the time it seemed like a perfectly normal thing to do, but it was a mistake in retrospect. If my friends didn’t prevent it, it would have led to a mushroom addiction that would have taken me down and not let me come back up.”

Apatow’s roommate back then was Adam Sandler. “We did standup every night, at the Improv. Those were really fun times for us because our whole day was about preparing for the 20 minutes we would be onstage that night.”

Girlsdeals with the unpleasant, but all too real, interactions of young people. For Apatow, living with Sandler highlighted some of the worst aspects of co-habitating. For one, Sandler would often leave the bathroom door open. “I would have liked it to be closed a little more often,” Apatow said. “He did not clean anything,” he added, laughing. “He used to rent cars, and then when they were completely filthy and trashed, he would return one and get a new one. But they were never cleaned. There was food growing in there.”

After the screening at the SVA Theater, the Girls cast enjoyed an evening that was most likely much more glamorous than anything their struggling onscreen characters would experience, partying at the Top of the Standard with famous folks like Katie Couric, Claire Danes, Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick, Calvin Klein, and Gina Gershon.